


Tombstone

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, M/M, Obvious Real World Parallels, not that shippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24499993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Arizona, 1881. The dust was bad, and there was always dust.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	Tombstone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [focusfixated](https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/gifts).



Aziraphale hated this place. The dust was bad, and there was always dust. It wasn’t his business, but it seemed like the humans were asking for trouble, given that they had named the town Tombstone. Arizona was also problematically hot. For a while, it had been crawling with cruel men in grey coats. The town had sprung up out of nothing around a handful of silver mines, and the money had brought trouble, in the form of rustlers, outlaws, gunfighters, Ladies of the Night, and other assorted hellions. In short, it was a disastrously uncomfortable place for an angel to be for very long, let alone for the period of time required to conduct an operation of utmost delicacy. 

By the time the events of October 26, 1881 rolled around, he had already been in this disastrous place for several months. It was longer than he had been anywhere since Boston in the 1770s. Worse, Crowley had showed up a few weeks before he had, having ridden into town with a motley crew of robbers and cattle rustlers, cooling his heels at the saloon and waiting for something bad to happen. 

The way you did things in the American West in the nineteenth century was show up at the bar, sit in the back corner, and watch how things unfolded for a while, or so Aziraphale had gathered from the other angels who had been assigned to such missions. But when he got to Tombstone, found the bar, ordered a glass of wine, was nearly beaten to a pulp, narrowly escaped through a series of quick miracles, ordered a whiskey, poured half of it on the floor, because his hands were shaking badly, and made his way to the back corner, he found that Crowley was already there. He wasn't wearing his sunglasses, because it was so dark in the far corner, and his hand rested on the table against the brim of his black hat, under which Aziraphale did not doubt he concealed some kind of fine pistol, unloaded, just for show. “Angel,” he said. 

Aziraphale dropped the rest of the whiskey on the floor. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you looked at it, Crowley had a bottle. 

“What the blazes are you doing out here?” 

Crowley stuck his tongue out. He'd done something nice to it so that it wasn’t forked. “Someone’s learning quick,” he said. “Ooh, what the blazes…” 

“We do have a basic crash course in popular culture,” said Aziraphale, sitting down and refreshing his glass. He noticed for the first time that it was chipped around the rim, and that there was a little blood, sitting in the chip, refracting light like a jewel. “Who are you trying to get?” 

“There are a lot of general baddies around here for the getting,” Crowley said cryptically. “It was a free-for-all when the Confederates were around. But I should think you’d have a harder go of it.” 

Aziraphale ignored him. He likely already knew that the brass upstairs was near on having kittens about how badly things were going in America. 

“I’m supposed to be working on this one family,” Crowley said. “Couple of brothers. Name of Earp.” 

“Hmm,” said Aziraphale, trying to act aloof and non-committal, even though he knew Crowley would see right through it. 

“I should think your side wants them too.” 

“Hmm. Maybe.” 

“For hell’s sake. Out with it, already!” 

“And why exactly would I tell you?” 

Crowley snorted. “I dunno,” he said. “The thrill of the game?” 

\--

The trouble with people in the West, Aziraphale figured, was that they were for the most part neither quite good nor bad. That was a silly oversimplification. Upstairs, in the boardrooms, and downstairs, in whatever passed for boardrooms down there, they had thought it was going to be easy: lawmen against outlaws. As though there did not exist crooked lawmen and virtuous outlaws. But, the brass was somehow not all that good with nuance, though they had been having to reckon with it for several thousand years by that point. 

To wit, the next time he and Crowley met, they discussed the emerging factions. Crowley had embedded himself with a loose gang of louts and desperadoes who called themselves the Cowboys. Aziraphale had gone over and had tea with the Earp brothers, which had been an awkward affair. 

“Rustling and horse thieving is illegal, I’ll remind you,” Aziraphale noted. 

“When have the structures of human law ever aligned with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ on a cosmic scale?” Crowley retorted, aggressively air-quoting. 

“It’s wrong to steal someone else’s property!” 

“Is it? What if they have more than they need and you’re starving?” 

Aziraphale buried his head in his hands. “We’re not about to rehash the French Revolution.” 

“Right,” Crowley said, lighting one of his sexy cigarillos. “You agreed with me then, I know you did.” 

“You keep telling yourself that! Anyway, this is an entirely different situation, and — ”

“Who says it’s an entirely different situation? Some of these ranchers got filthy rich letting the Confederacy smuggle cotton through their pastureland into Mexico. Is it wrong to rustle a couple cows they’ll never even notice are missing?” 

Aziraphale stewed. “We’re talking each other in circles,” he said. 

“We always do. That’s the nature of our friendship, isn’t it?” 

“Friendship?” 

Crowley looked away, ashing the little brown cigar in the tray by his hat. “Business acquaintanceship.” He sighed smoke. “How far did you get with the Earps.” 

Aziraphale fidgeted. “I suppose nobody around here is really as… virtuous as I’m accustomed to.” 

“Is it about that one brother who’s a pimp?” 

“Crowley!”

“What? He is! And according to the girls, not a very nice one.” 

“Oh, you’ve been talking to the girls, eh?” 

“Of course I have,” Crowley said. “And the boys too. What would… the son of god do?” 

He had a hard time saying _Jesus_ sometimes, depending on the positioning of the moon. 

“The Earps aren’t exactly beings of love and agents of heaven,” Crowley went on. “They’ve got ambition off the map. And ever since they were deputized, they’ve taken it upon themselves to look after their friends’ business interests.” 

“And what do the Cowboys do?” 

Crowley shrugged. “Survive,” he said. “This is a rough country.” 

\--

Aziraphale walked back to the room where he was living above the Chinese laundry, stewing. Crowley did always have thought-provoking things to say, but that was probably why he was so well-regarded as an agent of the devil. He thought about writing a communique to the boss, describing his thoughts and feelings with regard to how America seemed like a lost cause. But, knowing the boss, that wouldn’t be taken very well, and he would probably have to work in America for at least a millennia out of pure spite. 

_This is a rough country_? He almost laughed aloud. The other side had to have their very own crash course in popular culture, complete with overwrought metaphor. But it did sometimes seem a little surprising that god had created a place like this, being as it was so hot, and very red in places, and the scant flora and fauna was laden with spikes and venom. 

“She works in mysterious ways,” Aziraphale said out loud to himself, once he was safely ensconced in his room, making tea on the ashy fire. “She works in mysterious ways!” 

\--

In April, Aziraphale successfully cajoled the town council, of which he was a newly “elected” (miracled) member, into passing an ordinance requiring all weapons to be checked by visitors to town post-haste at a saloon or livery. In September, Crowley limped back to town, cleaned his wounds, and posted up at the back of his favorite saloon to tell varying iterations of a tale of murder and revenge in nearby Skeleton Canyon. Aziraphale, who had spent the afternoon with his bridge club, arrived late, by which time the events of the day were already the talk of the town. 

“Getting shot is the bloody worst,” Crowley said, taking his foot off the wicker chair across from him so that Aziraphale could sit down. 

“I’ve never experienced it and I don’t care to.” 

“You know, I think I would prefer it if what happens to people happened to us,” Crowley said thoughtfully. “If the bullets went in? It’s weirdest how they just pop back out. Frankly, I think I preferred swords.” 

“What happened?” 

“Mexican Commandos killed a couple Cowboys,” Crowley explained. “Not surprising, after last month.” 

“What happened last month?” 

Crowley fixed him with the eyes. He usually took his sunglasses off at the saloon, because it was so dark, and Aziraphale wondered if anybody else had noticed, and what they thought if they had. “You’re out of the loop, eh, angel?” 

Aziraphale ignored him. “What happens now?” 

“Dunno,” said Crowley. “Might rob a stage.” 

“Crowley!” 

“What?” Crowley took the box of cigarillos out of the front pocket of his shirt. It was badly dented, and Aziraphale realized that it had been struck by a bullet, and that if he was a human, he would have been dead. Crowley would have been dead many hundreds of thousands of times over, if he were a human, but it still seemed frightening sometimes, when Aziraphale was looking in the face of it. “Something actually has to happen around here,” Crowley went on, ignoring Aziraphale’s mild existential crisis. “It’s just simmering.” 

“Simmering is better than boiling.” 

“But simmering always ends in boiling,” Crowley said. “It can’t go on like this for much longer.” 

“What if you take the pot off the heat?” 

Crowley groaned. He struck a match against the table and the flame flared against the darkness. “I’m tired of this bloody metaphor,” he said. 

\--

They were both asked, much later, by representatives of their respective factions, to describe what had happened, only to find that they could not, because they had been in the saloon during the entire shootout, arguing, as per usual. They had of course gone running in the direction of the O.K. Corral when they had heard gunfire, which was rare in Tombstone after the passage of the ordinance, but when they got there the smoke had cleared, there were bodies in the dust, and the living combatants had all cleared out to hunt each other down in the streets. 

Crowley kicked a stone. “I can’t believe we bloody missed it!” 

“It’s not over yet,” Aziraphale reminded him. 

Indeed, there was a gleeful twenty-four hours when Aziraphale thought he might be done with this town forever, and that he might be shipped off to somewhere exciting, like California, only to receive an urgent missive from the brass that he was obliged to stay indefinitely for the hearings. He wasn’t happy about it, but he made the rounds, as was polite, to check up on the wounded Earp brothers at home. He even brought a fruitcake, and had tea in the kitchen with Wyatt’s common-law wife, but conversation was stilted, and he left feeling unwelcome. He attended the Spicer Hearings with Crowley, sitting in the back gallery, occasionally cringing at Crowley’s bellowing boos, hisses, and consumption of shelled peanuts. Aziraphale found the accusations that the Cowboys had surrendered prior to the shooting, and, as such, had been killed in cold blood by the Earps, to be chilling and wholly credible, but, after a month of testimony from just about everybody in town, the Justice of the Peace concluded that there was no basis for a full trial. 

Aziraphale wrote to the boss, recommending the Justice for heaven on the grounds of his thoroughness and adherence to the law, the way he had also recommended the leader of the Ladies’ Temperance League, his kindly landlord, who owned the Chinese laundry, and most of his bridge club. In a post-script, he asked, he thought quite politely and reasonably, for a transfer. But he was obliged to stick around through the winter, overseeing and sputtering in the face of a series of threats, assassinations, attempted assassinations, cripplings, and fights in the streets, all of it brought about by the seemingly never-ending Greek tragedy of Earp family angst and drama. Aziraphale and Crowley, who had sat through several seemingly never-ending Greek tragedies in their day, were soon fed up with Tombstone, Arizona, the West, and America in general. 

Come April, the Earps had worn out what little goodwill they had left in Tombstone by indiscriminately killing a rash of somewhat Cowboy-aligned hellions and rustlers, after which point warrants were issued for their arrest and they rode out from Arizona for good. 

“You can have them,” Aziraphale said, standing at the edge of town where the street dissolved into desert, watching the party’s dust rise into the white-blue sky. “I’m no longer interested.” 

“I’m not taking them,” Crowley told him. “They’re lawmen!” 

“Whatever happened to, human law has no correlation with the actual delineation of good and evil…” 

Crowley shuddered. “I just don’t want them,” he said. “The self-righteousness is too much, even for me. And they aren’t even any good at vengeance.” 

“Well, somebody has to take them.” 

“I think that decision might be above our respective pay grades,” Crowley said. “Cigarillo?” 

He passed the pack to Aziraphale, who took one. Because they were so far out, and nobody was looking, Crowley lit it with a snap of his fingers, and they walked back together toward town. 

“Where do you want to go,” Crowley asked him. 

“Not sure I can leave yet,” Aziraphale explained. “Haven’t heard back from the boss.” 

“What do you mean, you can’t leave? It’s a free country.” 

“Is it?” 

Crowley ignored that. That was something his people were working on. That was also something above his pay grade. “We can just get on a stage out of here, tonight. They can’t stop us.” 

“They can’t?” 

“I don’t think they will,” Crowley said. “This town is getting boring.” 

“They like me to be where it’s boring,” Aziraphale reminded him dejectedly. 

“Ah, but they like _me_ to be where the action is, and they like you to be where I am, about as well.” 

“Hmm,” said Aziraphale. He wasn’t sure he believed it was true, but he wanted to. 

“So where do you want to go?” 

“Anywhere,” Aziraphale told him. “Almost anywhere. I think I’d like to see it rain.”

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for [focusfixated](https://focusfixated.tumblr.com/) and an anonymous donor in exchange for their donations to organizations supporting racial justice protestors across america right now. i'm doing an [ongoing fundraising drive](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/619725572783947777/yeats-infection-yeats-infection) for these organizations - if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will, please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something.


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